Why we're not a zero-waste household

It's been nearly ten years since I discovered that the rule I'd come to think of as the Law of Beverages—namely, don't pay for water when you can add it yourself—was not always true. In some cases, I learned, fresh juice and milk were actually cheaper than frozen concentrate and dry milk powder. In fact, within a few years of that post, we began to find that the fresh forms were almost always cheaper, and it's now been years since we bought either powdered milk or frozen juice. (To be fair, it's now been years since we bought fresh dairy milk, either, but powdered soy milk is even less of a bargain than powdered cow's milk.)

So I was a bit skeptical when a recent Climate Coach newsletter opened with the headline, "Shampoos and soaps are mostly water. Here’s why you should buy them without it." In the column, author Michael Coren explains how he realized one day that his bathroom was full of plastic containers, and most of the stuff in them had water as its #1 ingredient. Rather than "spending so much money on plastic containers filled with water," he concluded, he should just buy the "active ingredients" in a more concentrated form.

In theory, I'm all for this idea. Shipping water all over the globe—or at least to those parts of the globe where clean water comes out of a tap—is clearly a waste of fuel, and shipping it in plastic containers contributes to the growing problem of plastic waste. But eliminating this waste isn't so simple as Coren makes it sound. In my experience, waste-free versions of products like shampoo, conditioner, and toothpaste aren't easy to find in stores, and the ones you can find online are considerably more expensive. In cases like these, there is no obvious ecofrugal choice that's better both environmentally and cost-wise. The best you can do is balance the costs and benefits—price versus plastic waste—and figure out which matters more to you.

So far, Brian and I have generally come down on the side of saving money. We might be willing to spend a little more for the more concentrated, lower-waste products, but a little more is not what we're talking about here. Here's how the math works out for the personal care goods we use most often:

• Shampoo. Brian uses a store-brand shampoo from Target that costs $6 for a 1-liter bottle. He uses it maybe three times a week, and I also use it daily as a body wash, since I read somewhere that it was good for dry skin. One bottle of it lasts us three or four months—say 15 weeks—so that works out to around 4 cents per use. The bar shampoo that Michael Coren recommends as an alternative, Sustainabar, costs $10 and lasts "about 80 washes," or 12.5 cents per use. If we switched to this shampoo full-time, we'd be paying an extra $44.20 per year to avoid tossing three or four #2 plastic bottles in the recycling bin. Basically, we'd be paying around $13 to save each bottle.
• Conditioner. I use Suave Almond and Shea Butter conditioner, which costs around $5 for a 28-ounce bottle. Although I use a generous dollop every day on my dry, curly hair, that bottle still lasts me around three months, for a price of around 5.5 cents per use. Sustainabar's jojoba conditioner, like its shampoo, costs 12.5 cents per use ($10 for an 80-use bar). That's not as bad as the shampoo—only about 2.3 times as expensive—but it would still add up to an extra $25.55 per year, or $6.39 per bottle of avoided waste.
• Toothpaste. This is by far the worst of the lot. Currently, we pay $3 for a 6-ounce tube of toothpaste from Trader Joe's that lasts us about two months. Since we both brush our teeth twice a day, that's about 1.25 cents per brushing. The Unpaste toothpaste tablets Coren recommends cost $9.50 for a bag of 125, or 7.6 cents per brushing—more than six times as much. Switching to Unpaste would cost us a whopping $92.96 per year extra to avoid tossing six empty toothpaste tubes—$15.49 per tube. (And incidentally, these prices don't include shipping, which would make the numbers even worse.)

Now, for some folks, these expensive products are well worth the cost. They're willing to pay whatever it takes to achieve a "zero-waste" home, where virtually nothing ever goes into the trash can. But for me, spending this much money to avoid such a small amount of waste doesn't seem ecofrugal. I'd rather, for instance, spend $13 per year for a Snap toothbrush and toss four worn-out toothbrush heads in the trash than buy the completely waste-free Everloop toothbrush, with its removable and compostable bamboo bristles, for—wait for it—$155. Plus shipping. Even with a two-year supply of bristles, that's over $70 extra per year to avoid less than an ounce of waste. I honestly can't see this as a good use of resources.

To be clear, I'm still entirely in favor of reducing waste when the cost is reasonable—or, better yet, when it actually saves you money. In fact, the very same day I read that Climate Coach newsletter and grumbled over all its pricey product recommendations, I eagerly snapped up a new shampoo bar that we discovered at Trader Joe's, which cost just $4 for 4 ounces (113 grams). Since the 80-gram Sustainabar shampoo is supposed to last 80 uses, this one will presumably be good for about 113 uses, which works out to 3.54 cents per use—less than Brian's paying now for his Target shampoo. It comes with no plastic waste, just a little cardboard box (which could potentially be reused). And, like Brian's current shampoo, it contains no obvious palm oil, even if a couple of its ingredients could potentially be palm oil derivatives. In short, assuming this stuff works well on Brian's hair, it will be better in every possible way than the shampoo he's using now—an ecofrugal win-win, rather than a tradeoff of cost versus virtue. (And if I can't use this stuff on my skin the way I'm now using the Target shampoo, that's okay; our Trader Joe's bar soap—another inexpensive, lightly packaged product—should work fine.)

 

UPDATE, January 2024: An additional wrinkle where toothpaste is concerned. According to a 2022 life-cycle analysis, toothpaste tablets are actually more harmful to the environment than toothpaste in a tube. The benefit of having less packaging is more than offset by the impact of their ingredients and the size of a single portion. (If you don't want to read the study, you can watch this glamorous sustainability influencer explain it on YouTube.) So instead of paying significantly more for a tiny environmental benefit, I'd be paying significantly more to cause more environmental damage. Forget that.